...we have a right to narrow down our universe ever further and further; until like the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey it is made up of certain s… - John Cowper Powys

What they were aware of was the dumb, numb, cold, heavy downward drag of the vast undersea forces that are sub-human; chemical forces, that belong to that formless world of the half-created and the half-organic whereof bodies of lower dimensions than ours are composed and which has a mysterious weight that draws down, a pull, a tug, a centripetal gravitation, against which the soul within us struggles and upon the surface of which it swims, and over which, when the process of decomposition commences, it spreads its contemptuous wings.

Having once aroused in our mind enough faith in our own will-power to create a universe of contemplation and forget everything else, there are few limitations to the happiness we may enjoy.

She [Mother Legge] was a vast, dusky, double-chinned mountain of a woman, with astute, little grey eyes; eyes that seemed rather to aim at not seeing what she wanted to avoid, than at seeing what she wanted to see.